Anyway, I didn’t finish replying because my brain seems to be malfunctioning today. Maybe I need an oil change or something.
I don’t care that much about the use of the term “dialect”. And there are certainly other uses than the standard linguistic use - literature is sometimes referred to as being written in “dialect” (or “vernacular”) in order to distinguish it from literature written in what linguists would term the standard dialect.
My real problem with Sage Rat is not over misuse of terms but rather that I think he’s trying to draw some sort of distinction that’s not valid - while obviously you can regard segmental phonology and suprasegmental phonology (do people say that?) separately, I don’t see how it makes any sense to make that distinction when talking about dialects.
Having lived in central ohio the first 29 years of my life and now LA for going on two, I can say that I haven’t noticed a discernable ‘west coast’ accent.
Yes, as to this, I would say we can only directly study individual idiolects (and this is not a reflection on anyone’s IQ: idiolect means the unique way each individual speaks). Higher-level groupings are sort of an abstraction, in that their membership is determined by arbitrary choices.
I was going to look at it by breaking down segmental phonology itself into phonemic and phonetic – because a certain wise rodent has provided a fine illustration of how the more generalized terms emic and etic were derived (by clipping) from phonemic and phonetic, their original models. Called attention to the specifically suprasegmental difference between an American saying “shed yule” and a native Brit saying the identical segments. Sage Rat, you get credit for setting up this analysis logically; you just didn’t know the terminology used by linguists. That’s why I wanted to be careful to clarify how technical language differs from common usage. A linguist needs to be conversant with both at once. It’s like a geologist knowing her books and graphs, but also knowing her rocks from the real earth, hands-on in the field. In geology, field means wherever geological matter is found in its natural habitat.
Apologies, just took a break from the thread for a few days.
Anyhoo. I* am fine with having used the wrong word, but I’m not sure whether or not you’ve yet said what the technical word is that I wanted. You mentioned “pitch” so I’ve tried to go with that, but I’m not sure whether that is correct.
My understanding of accent vs. dialect was that an accent is simply a sound/pitch/tone, while as a dialect was a matter of word choice and pronunciation. Obviously some tones will effect the pronunciation, for instance the nasal-centerdness of French intonation which brings us the an/in/en differences. For those (in French) if you don’t have the intonation right it just isn’t being pronounced the same. And of course on the other side would be skedyule/shedyule where the throat/nasal/pitch has nothing to do with the pronunciation.
Now if “accent” as most members of the board means “dialect” as I understood it, then that’s fine. But it still doesn’t answer the question posed, it just means I used the wrong word. And of course raises the question of what one is to term this thing which is not an accent. “Pitch” seems rather simplistic when really it is an issue of the throat, nasal passage, and where you tend to have the center of your tongue in your mouth while speaking. Pitch does of course enter into that, but still it is more than just that.
Come to think of it, there may be a specific word or two that are to California like the “aboat” pronunciation of about is to Canada. I was told in a couple of my linguistics classes that some Californians have a special pronunciation of good, and living here, I can definitely hear it, though not with everyone. Due no doubt to the influence of the initial ‘g’, the vowel is higher and less round, so it comes out somewhat like ‘guid’, except with the ‘u’ and ‘i’ pronounced simultaneously–almost like a German u-umlaut, but not quite so rounded.
I was at a wine shop the other day and heard the next person in line discussing a wine with the clerk, and saying that it was ‘guid’.
Disclaimer 1: hobbist actor who does dialects (not a linguist), also a musician.
Disclaimer 2: yeah, I read the thread.
When people sing, the nuances of accent and rhythm tend to become suppressed to the needs of the song — assuming that we’re speaking of music written in English by English-speaking people, and sung on-rhythm and on-pitch. What you might immediately identify as a spoken Dublin accept by its characteristic lilt and pitch might sound more like a familiar American accent when the voice has been manacled to 440 hz = A natural, 4/4 time 120bpm. This means a sixteenth note is about an eighth of a second long — but changes in spoken rhythm are usually much more subtle than that, and not nearly as regularly spaced.
This doesn’t mean that they are singing with an American accent, but that both American singers and others are substituting the music’s natural rhythm and pitch for their own. This makes it harder for your ear to discern accent, making the differences between them more slight. Listen to “99 Luftballoons” sometime and you’ll definitely hear the accent. Or pick up some Sahara Hotnights.
Sometimes in unison or harmony singing, vowel combinations are flattened out. An “oy” sound may be pronounced oyeeeeeeee or ooooooooooyee. We choose one of the two and sing it together. This produces a more consonant sound and better harmony than if you were on the “ooooooy” part and I was on the “yeeeeee” part.
The same goes for certain plosives and stops and sibilants, which are typically suppressed by compressor/limiter equipment, and by singers themselves: you don’t want three people ending a consonant like “T” in separate places, as you’ll get “hit-ttt-t me with your best-t-tt shott-t-ttt” as everybody ends in different places. So in that song, you might hear the background singers going “hih me with your bess shaw” while only the lead sings the Ts.
Go figure. It’s very natural for some people to slip into a dialect that isn’t their own. Once it gets stuck in your head, it becomes easier and easier to find yourself falling into it. That’s how some people move across the country and pick up the local dialect: it happens all the time, though not to everyone.
Don’t think of West Coast dialect as “base” or “natural” or “zero.” Think of it more like red-red-violet on the color wheel. You can’t get more red-red-violet than red-red-violet, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t red-violet-red next door.
I don’t know. I could see that signing could make it hard to preserve the intonation of your accent, but…well a) that just supports the idea that the West Coast sound is one which has nothing added, unless b) we can determine if it sounds to everyone like people are signing in their local accent (i.e. when Brits listen to Britney Spears, she sounds British to them.) I’m not sure I trust that “b” is true as most of the people who have commented agree that almost all pop singers sound like Americans.
To my Australian ears, I can often (but not always) tell a Californian accent from a generic ‘American’ one, which I think of as more or less mid-western. The Californian accent seems just a touch sharper if anything.
I’m a big fan of the way the Dutch speak English. There may be no such thing as ‘no accent’, but some Dutch people speak English in a way that seeems to most approach that.
The English language did not spring forth from Sage Rat’s forehead on the West Coast and travel elsewhere from there, adding dialect as it went.
Besides, as I pointed out, a singing accent isn’t necessarily like a West Coast accent. We on the West Coast do not drop terminal Ts the way singers sometimes do for practical, non-dialect reasons.
It is very possible to sing with a flat-vowel singing accent and not sound like a West Coast Amerian. Take country music, for example. They’re still singing their vowels flatly and pronouncing them differently.
That’s why I referred to the difference between phonemic and phonetic before. Analysis of an accent includes pronunciation; analysis of a dialect also includes pronunciation–among other things. Sage Rat would notice a difference in “accent” if two speakers pronounced the same phonemes with a slightly different phonetic realization. For example, there is only one phoneme slot in English for /t/. If you speak English as you normally do but change all the /t/ sounds, which in English are realized as alveolar, to dental, it would still function as exactly the same phoneme /t/, but you would sound like a foreigner.
Yes, but what letters are pronounced or are dropped isn’t the sort of thing I am referring to.
Indeed, many Country Western singers sing with phonemic accents (eh, giving the word a shot.) The question is whether they are having to work extra to do this, or if they are the only ones who have not fallen into the whole “singing like West Coast Americans” movement of the 60s, and did not thus practice and perfect this art? If you know that, then I will (finally) have my answer.
No. “Phonetic accent” and “phonemic accent” are nonsense terms.
I’m sorry, but what you’re “intending” simply does not have any external reality. It does not describe the world. The simple fact is that you’re trying to somehow separate “pronunciation” from other things - namely, suprasegmental phenomena - in a way that’s wholly artificial and doesn’t match the real world.
West Coast Americans have an accent, in that they have a particular regional way of speaking that is not the same as everyone else’s. You seem to think you can somehow reason your way into proving that the way you speak is some sort of natural default, and everyone else speaks “with an accent”, but that’s not logically coherent; frankly, it just doesn’t make any sense.
“Letters” are not “pronounced” or “dropped” in any context, since letters are marks on paper.
I’m sorry, but you don’t seem to have even an elementary understanding of phonetics or phonology, and it’s really hard to discuss these things meaningfully without them. You seem to be trying to read Johanna’s posts in order to find some magic combination of words that will make your point meaningful, but the trouble is that your idea is not consonant with reality.
She’s trying to help explain some of these basic ideas that you don’t understand, but as far as I can tell you’re not really listening well; you’re mostly just trying to fit what she’s saying into your hypothesis, but your hypothesis is simply wrong and you’re going to keep coming up with nonsense like “phonemic accent” if you continue to selectively listen to what others are telling you.
Well apparently the study of linguistics has all three words that refer to linguistical things that are commonly used in the vernacular mean the same thing. I.e. dialect, accent, and pronunciation. These mean different things to me, but apparently not to you–and that they are too locked in your head for them to be separated.
So let’s try without using these words.
We will first say that for any word, there are various letters. And we will pretend that they have a certain definite specifiation for how the sound is to be created. For instance the sound “p” is created by pressing your lips together and forcing air against them, then releasing your lips suddenly so that a soft bursting sound is made. This would be the “Methoding” of the letter “p.” The sum of the methodings of the letters in any word is also known as the methoding. Unfortunately, different groups of people will reuse the same characters and words, but use a different methoding for it.
We will also say that for any region or clique that certain words become more or less popular. Certain methodings will become more and less popular as well. This will is a “Cliquety.”
And further we will say that for any region or clique will have an “Octavity” so called because many of these groups see a need to change the octave at which they speak normally. Of course, one could say that changing octave when speaking would be methoding differently, but no; “Methoding” describes what the minimum is to create the sound of letter is and have it still be recognizable as that letter. Octavity may influence how it reaches you, but still the methoding is the same.
Thus we might have a country which is divided into four regions, North, South, East, and West. In the North and East, the methoding of the letter “s” is soft like a snake hiss. And in the South and Wast, the methoding is buzzing like we would generally pronounce a “z.” The N-E cliquety also prefers to use the word “you” while the S-W cliquety prefers to use “yer.”
But in this country, the octavities do not follow the cliqueties. The North and West use a high pitched screech of an octavity to talk. And the South and East speak in a very low pitched grumble of an octavity.
So to translate the sentence you didn’t understand, it is possible for a person to have perfect methoding and word choice of the local cliquety, but still speak with your original octavity, thus giving away that you are a foreigner.
If there are technical words in linguistics that match up with methoding, cliquety, and octavity, I will gladly use them. Otherwise I am fine to redo my OP using these three words, assuming that we are fine with the definitions.
That’s not true. The three terms mean very different things to me; nevertheless, they are not “locked in my head” - though it would be easier if you used technical vocabulary properly, since you are trying to discuss something that would benefit from the insight of people who have studied the subject.
And your use of the word “accent” in particular has been extremely inconsistent and, frankly, I think you simply don’t necessarily know how to describe or really even understand what you’re hearing.
Stop right there. Words are not composed of letters. Letters are marks on paper used to represent language in writing; you can’t “pronounce” a letter because a letter is an artifact of our writing system. Certainly you realize that English spelling doesn’t reflect pronunciation very well; look at a word like “colonel” to see that the idea of pronouncing letters is a bad one.
Words are created out of phonemes, which are something of an abstract concept - native speakers of a language will perceive, say, a /t/ phoneme as representing one sound, when actually it’s composed of several different ones. For a quick and easy example, “team”, “steam”, and “letter” all actually have different sounds, or “phones” - but they sound identical to a speaker of a language. Which sound is used in any particular circumstance depends on the sounds around it; the /t/ in “team” is aspirated since it is at the beginning of a syllable, while the /t/ in “steam” is not. The /t/ in “letter” is an alveolar flap, much like the Spanish /r/, since it is between two vowel sounds. So in a phonetic transcription, they would all be represented with different symbols - [t[sup]h[/sup]] is the /t/ in “team”, “steam” is [t] (note the lack of a superscript “h”, and “letter” is [4] (using SAMPA notation; the exact values are not important.) However, in phonemic transcription, they would all be represented as /t/.
That’s the difference between phonemic and phonetic transcription. A phonetic transcription tries to represent each sound precisely, while a phonemic transcription tries to represent each sound as it’s perceived by a native speaker. That’s what Johanna was alluding to earlier.
“Pronunciation” would be the word here.
Right. Different native speakers of a language will pronounce a word differently.
A variety of language spoken in a particular region is a “dialect” - for instance, American English is divided into several dialects including Midwestern, Southern, Mid-Atlantic, Western, etc.; a variety of language spoken by a particular class or group of people (say, African-American Vernacular English or AAVE) is a “sociolect”. In general, the term “variety” is used to describe (not surprisingly) different varieties of language (or occasionally “lect”.)
We won’t say anything of the sort until you find specific evidence for it. There are obviously some differences in manner of speaking, but I’m not familiar with any work that suggests that different American dialects use different pitches to speak, not on a consistent basis.
Once again, I’m not sure what you’re trying to get at here. I simply don’t think you’re drawing a valid distinction. That is, I don’t think it’s valid to separate pronunciation and suprasegmental aspects of speech (things like speed, intonation, and so forth). Things like, say, the rising intonation? popularly associated with Valley Girl speech? exist in concert with differences? in which sounds they produce in pronouncing different phonemes? You’re trying to separate two things that aren’t separate; people in different regions - that is, speakers of different dialects - vary in lots of ways simultaneously, and even setting aside stuff like word choice, accents include both differences in the way phones, or segments, are produced, and differences in suprasegmental aspects of how they speak.
Except that doesn’t make sense. Why would a particular speech community share word choices or pronunciations of sounds and not share suprasegmental aspects of speech? Varieties arise in language because people speak like those around them; for instance, babies tend to learn to speak from their parents, who - not by sheer coincidence! - tend to live near them.
Both things impact how speech is perceived; foreigners might consistently mispronounce certain sounds that don’t exist in their native languages, and they might carry over typical intonation patterns and such from their native language. Think of Indians, who tend to feature retroflex /t/ sounds (pronounced with the tongue curled back against the roof of the mouth) and non-English intonation patterns.
I’m guessing that you were suggesting that a Japanese speaker could somehow pronounce each sound with all their articulatory organs used exactly as an English speaker does, but with (say) atypical speed or intonation; I don’t think that’s very likely to occur. (In fact, I bet the other way is probably more common. It’s hard to learn sounds you don’t have in your native language.)
I don’t think there is a single concept matching “octavity”; I don’t think that matches to any particular aspect of how people speak. I’m assuming now you mean to describe intonation (and things like that). But earlier you said something about a French accent being “nasal”, and nasal is an effect of how the speech organs are shaped; by lowering the velum, you allow passage of air through the nose, which is what creates nasal vowels (which French has a bunch of) and nasal consonants, which both French and English have. To speak either language, you need to be able to raise and lower your velum; nasality is an important feature in pronouncing words in practically every language. If a French person speaks with a distinctly nasal voice, that’s because they’re mispronouncing English vowels. (Further, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a French person speaking English with a particularly nasal accent; I could spot a number of ways in which they pronounce individual sounds differently, though.)
Like I said, I think your ideas are simply inaccurate; I don’t think those different things you’re getting at vary independently. I can accept discounting word choice for the discussion. And you’re right that things like “skedule” versus “shedule” are separate from the other things you’re talking about - those are differences pertaining to which phonemes a word is composed of, and those are haphazard: you can understand them as simply that Brits and Americans have a different pronunciation for “schedule” or “laboratory” stored in their “mental dictionaries”.
But when I mentioned consistent differences in vowel quality, you dismissed that - and that’s problematic, because those things aren’t aspects of how words are stored in the mental dictionary but rather of what a phoneme represents in different dialects. They aren’t haphazard - they’re absolutely consistent. Those things are a feature of how the language variety’s sound system works, not different ways of pronouncing a word. You’re trying to somehow artificially separate two things that aren’t separate; a foreigner with an accent might have different intonation in their speech, but they very certainly pronounce sounds differently. Someone with a Spanish accent will tend to pronounce /t/ as a dental sound, which means that their tongue is pressed against their front teeth rather than the alveolum, which is a ridge behind the front teeth, and it’s where an English /t/ is made. And you might very well not notice such things or not recognize them properly (not that I necessarily could, if it was an accent from a language I don’t speak - it’s extremely difficult to precisely transcribe speech; it’s a skill that has to be developed.)
Like I said, while there’s some vocabulary problems here, I think what you’re proposing is just not conceptually valid.
Technically, written letters have nothing to do with Linguistics. Many a time did I have to exhort my fellow students in study sessions to “divorce your mind from the orthography of the language.”
Now, an aside, if y’all* don’t mind. Excalibre, I thought you were just an amateur student of Linguistics. Did you decide to go back to school and get an advanced degree? If so, I’m seriously jealous!
*“Y’all” is a dialectal variant of “you (2nd person plural pronoun).” There is a variety, even within a dialectal region of pronunciation of the word, yet nobody of whom I know would daresay that any of those pronunciations isn’t part of the dialect concerned.
Then it appears that my words have no translation in technical jargon. For a linguist it may make sense that you are better to take a snapshot of a phoneme being pronounced by a native speaker and mark it as its own character and do this to capture all the sounds of the language. But just as some guy who can do impressions, he does so by keeping his throat, tongue and so forth positioned slightly differently, stressing some sounds more or less, than the way he normally does, and that difference forces the same words and letters to come out sounding different.
To the (or at least this) lay-person, it makes a lot more sense to say that the only difference between (sh)edyule and (s)(k)edyule methoding is that there is only a single difference. Any discernable difference between a native speaker saying the word and a foreign after that would be an overall different “addition” to their speach, and not that they were using an entirely different sound for each individual character. A unique phonetic alphabet would essentially be required per not only every single region of the world, but even for at different time periods. For something as unquantifiable as the pitch at which one speaks or how long he holds the “m” sound in his words, trying to represent “m” differently for each language sounds impossible. While as taking a snapshot of the throat/nose/tongue area and saying “Ya set yourself up about like this and start talking to sound cockney” makes a lot more sense. Of course you can’t codify that as individual phonemic characters anymore–but then I can’t see that you ever would have been able to either without a lot of characters or some serious markup.
[quote]
A variety of language spoken in a particular region is a “dialect” - for instance, American English is divided into several dialects including Midwestern, Southern, Mid-Atlantic, Western, etc.; a variety of language spoken by a particular class or group of people (say, African-American Vernacular English or AAVE) is a “sociolect”. In general, the term “variety” is used to describe (not surprisingly) different varieties of language (or occasionally “lect”.)
[quote]
Dialect means the same thing to me, so apparently we can dispell of cliquety.
I’m not sure that an American ones do either. Choosing to have “octavity” only refer to pitch was just because pitch is something easily quantifiable and where you can say that any sound X can be pronounced at any pitch and stiil be discernably sound x. As stated many times in the thread I’m meaning something more than just pitch, but rather a whole series of various things that effect the overall sound–of which pitch would just be one. And in Japanese, yes, there is a pitch change for “manly talk.” In modern day it might have somewhat to do with smoking, but still generally the overall pitch of Japanese men lowers as they go from single to married with children. And of course that if you ever hear an impression of some samurai warrior talking, they’ll speak in a low growl.
Regardless of whether it is how you or the linguistic society chooses not to separate these, unfortunately it is what my OP question requires in order to be answered.
Ah, and now that I know the word suprasegmental, I can re-state that one sentence:
“Japanese person A is able to nearly pronounce English perfectly but unfortunately has not been able to match the suprasegmental aspects of the locals.”
Would, I guess, be the closest I can render it to your definitions.
And perhaps my definition of accent is different from society at large–I guess I would need a poll to check–but for the moment I would maintain that to most when people say that some foreign person speaks with an accent, that they are referring to those suprasegmental differences principally and not word or phoneme choice.
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Except that doesn’t make sense. Why would a particular speech community share word choices or pronunciations of sounds and not share suprasegmental aspects of speech?
[quote]
All Americans pronounce it “skedyule” just the same, and yet we all sound different saying it. Whether it makes sense for that to have become so doesn’t really matter as it is still the world we are presented with. We have agreed on a specific methoding for the word as a country, but alternate in our octavity by region. While as “fer” of “fer sure” would be a localized methoding popular Valley Girls and some Southerners (i.e. “Fer chrisakes Billy-Joe!”), and yet have entirely separate and unrelated octavitings. Just because they both use “fer” doesn’t mean that any other words are going to share methoding.
No. That is not what I mean. Only the bare minimum of those organs would be alligned correctly. Methoding describes only the bare minimum of positioning of articulary organs to create a sound that is distinguishable as the same character. For instance, with the methoding/octaviting paradigm, there would be no difference between the t in team or steam. Anyone who could discernably method it as a “t” sound is methoding it just fine for the local dialect.
But there is! And it is called: Ocativity! We’ll just have to go with it.
Obviously if you can distinguish whether the speaker is native or not, they’re doing something wrong. It’s just a question of whether you choose to say that they are wrong by phoneme, or just overall are wrong for it all (just that it may not be apparent for certain characters for which the methoding doesn’t involve, for instance, nasality.)
Doing a bit of a French accent to speak English, you might be correct that it isn’t terribly nasal. Rather I seem to be keeping the back of my tongue held more tense (I think. Rather hard to quantify when you are just doing it naturally.)
Not innacurate as such, just a different method of breaking up the elements. But whether that matches up with even the vernacular definitions of the words, I’ve no idea. I had assumed so, but perhaps the topic has never come up before to any degree that the difference in definition came up.
[quote]
But when I mentioned consistent differences in vowel quality, you dismissed that - and that’s problematic, because those things aren’t aspects of how words are stored in the mental dictionary but rather of what a phoneme represents in different dialects. They aren’t haphazard - they’re absolutely consistent. Those things are a feature of how the language variety’s sound system works, not different ways of pronouncing a word.
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I would say that the in/an/en vowel sounds of the French are separate vowel sounds that don’t exist in English. But I wouldn’t say that the “ou” sound of French “vous” and “oo” of American “loot.” Yet, I would still be able to tell whether it was an American or a French person saying the word. You might say that they are (v)[sup]A/sup[sup]A[/sup] and (l)[sup]B/sup[sup]B/sup[sup]B[/sup] and that if you don’t do pronounce each sound specifically as an local would then your pronunciation is wrong, while as I would mark them as “(v)(ou)” and “(l)(ou)(t)” and then say that there are octavities French and American, and that so long as each (X) item is discernably that item then their methoding is just perfect, only there might be a remaining octavity.
Well, to linguists it might make more sense to list them as entirely separate /t/s, but for me if it’s obviously a t, you may as well call it a t and just say that he does his with an accent.
Well I’m not proposing anything as such. I’m explaining my breakdown of pronunciation so that my question might be answered. Whether that breakdown is one that would in the long run be useful system to classify languages isn’t really relevant. It isn’t a scientific system nor was it set up to be so. It might not be useful to classify clouds as “fluffy” or “thin” either, but if you’re dealing with a lay-person who doesn’t know his cumolous from his nimbus, and is specifically asking about the difference between “fluffy” and “thin” and yet there is no direct translation to those words in the technical jargon–I’m not sure it makes sense to say that “fluffy” and “thin” aren’t valid cloud classifications. They are simply not useful classifications to scientists.
